The budget in terms we all can digest and understand. (2011)

The U.S. Congress sets a federal budget every year in the trillions of dollars. Few people know how much money that is so we created a breakdown of federal spending in simple terms. Let’s put the 2011 federal budget into perspective:

U.S. income: $2,170,000,000,000

Federal budget: $3,820,000,000,000

New debt: $1,650,000,000,000

National debt: $14,271,000,000,000

Recent budget cut: $38,500,000,000 (about 1% of the budget)

It helps to think about these numbers in terms that we can relate to. Let’s remove eight zeros from these numbers and pretend this is the household budget for the fictitious Jones family.